Page 51

“Then you’ll both leave me,” Hestraon murmured.

When Lore’s eyes opened, the trees were burnt again.

The moss was comfortable. The island warmth and the futility of her mission pulled at her eyelids, made her body settle.

Lore didn’t realize she’d fallen asleep until she saw the ocean.

She sat up, frowning.

The tide had washed in, warm as bathwater, soaking the filmy white dress she was always wearing here. Lore pulled her knees into her chest and rested her chin on them, staring out at the eternity of blue, the sky meeting the ocean.

If the Shining Realm had existed, it would probably look like this.

Gabe didn’t call her name. Didn’t do anything but come sit beside her. Like Hestraon in Nyxara’s memory, he reached out and took her hand, staring out over the endless horizon.

“How are things going for you?” she asked softly.

“Shitty,” he answered. “You?”

“About the same.”

He glanced at her. “I heard you escaped.”

“ Escaped might be overselling it.” Lore stroked her thumb along his. “But I’m off the Second Isle. I’m at the Mount.”

He huffed a laugh. “I should have known you could do it.”

Her wrist still itched with the ghost of that ribbon in Nyxara’s memories. Her nerves tingled with the aftershocks of intimacy she hadn’t experienced.

Lore was so gods-damned tired of waiting. Of existing in this stasis where every step forward came with a step back. Of losing herself in increments.

Once, she’d been a person who took what she wanted.

When she turned to Gabe, he was already looking at her. A question already in his eyes, a tenseness to his limbs, everything they had never allowed to happen crashing into this moment.

She leaned forward and answered the question.

Lore had thought before about how different it was, kissing Gabe versus kissing Bastian. How Bastian was a slow explosion, a discovery, while Gabe was all flash and fire. He proved it once again; there was no easing into this kiss, no steady build. They fell into each other like starving animals.

His mouth opened to hers like it was all he’d been thinking about. His tongue brushed along the side of her own, hungry and seeking. Her body, already warmed, went up like kindling to a spark.

Gabe pulled her onto his lap; Lore straddled his waist, hips already chasing friction. His hands were on the softness of her waist, pulling at the hem of her white robe, tossing it away into the surf.

He sat back, eyes glazed, taking her in. He didn’t speak, didn’t need to.

Another searing kiss, his hands rising from her waist to find her breasts—Lore threw her head back as his thumbs circled the gathered peaks, her gasp loud in the silence, without even the sound of the tide to blunt it.

As he kissed her neck, Lore took his hands, guided them behind her back. She put her wrists together like Nyxara’s had been, pulling his fingers to circle them, bind them.

“Make me,” she whispered. He’d know what she meant.

And he did. Gabe looked at her with glazed eyes and nodded.

Quick but still gentle, he flipped her over, back against the soft sand. He held her arms prone over her head so her body stretched out below him, helpless and writhing.

Bastian had wanted her in charge, that night. Wanted to give up control, wanted to know that their intimacy was only theirs. They might have the same wants as the gods who’d chosen them as vessels, but that didn’t make those wants any less their own.

She wanted to be held down. Wanted to be denied, in an imitation of the way he’d denied her before. But this time, within her own parameters, and with the heated understanding that the denial was coming to an end.

Her body ached for him to touch her. Lore canted up her hips, trying to guide his hand that wasn’t holding her arms over her head; Gabe gave her a tiny slap on the thigh. The sting of it made her jump, made her breath come ragged and all her nerves pull tight.

“Patience,” he said, gently pushing her hair away from her face, touching her everywhere but the places she wanted. Lore turned her head, tried to capture his finger in her mouth; he pulled away with another light slap, this time right below her hips, and she arched into it.

“I’ve been patient.” She pressed her thighs together, all but panting. “You could have had this at any time. All you had to do was say the word.”

“I know,” he said, skimming his hand lightly down her neck, between her breasts, but lifting it away before he went lower. “So I’m making up for lost time.”

Because there was no way to know if this first time would also be the last.

As if he’d heard the thought, he kissed her again, tender and sweet, a counterpoint to the pressure he held on her wrists. And finally, his hand went where she wanted it.

Lore writhed on the sand while Gabe played her like a harp, bringing her over and over to a breaking point, then taking it away right before she went over the edge. She gasped and she cursed, quivering while he laughed, low and rumbling against her neck, kissing her there to make up for it.

“You asshole.” Her voice came broken, every nerve in her body vibrating like glass about to shatter. “You’re a monk, you shouldn’t be so good at this.”

He chuckled again against the shell of her ear, the sound going straight through her and making her legs clench around his hand. “I didn’t always hold so close to my vows. I told you that.”

She looked at him, something bittersweet spilling through her chest. “So why not with me?”

He looked at her a moment, all games gone, his eyes still heated but with a kind of sadness, too.

He kissed her cheek. Not her forehead, like Bastian did, as if he knew that they each had a place with her and wouldn’t overstep.

“Because I knew I would love you, and I didn’t know how to yet. It was too much.”

It was all still too much. But she didn’t want to think about that. She angled her chin so he would move his kiss to her mouth, and as it went deeper, as his hand worked at her just where she needed him to, she finally came with a hoarse scream.

Gabe swallowed it, let her ride it out, his palm pressed flat against her as she tremored through the aftershocks. When it was done, he let go of her wrists, gathered her close.

But Lore wasn’t going to let that be it. She tugged at his hip bone, just like she had that night in her room, cold window glass at her back.

This time, he did what she wanted.

Lore sat on her knees on the sand as Gabe slowly stood, slowly took off his robe—a feat, since it was the same one she’d been wearing, but he managed to make it last. He was as meticulous with this as he was with everything else, folding it neatly, laying it flat on the ground.

“Gods,” she rasped, “hurry the fuck up.”

“Watch your pretty mouth,” he said, looming over her still, grasping her chin in a firm but gentle hand, “unless you want something else to do with it.”

“Maybe I do,” she said, and proved it. He tasted like salt, and she licked along him, humming in approval when he tensed.

“Gods,” Gabe murmured. “ Gods .”

His head dropped back, his breathing ragged, and when she hummed, he jerked, one hand coming to her head and pushing her away. “That’s enough, unless you want to wait at least fifteen more minutes.”

“I’ve waited longer,” Lore said, but she let him lay her down on the sand, let him brace himself above her. And when he surged into her, she kissed him again, and didn’t stop until both of them came apart, the tide swelling around them.

They didn’t untangle, even afterward. Gabe dropped his head into the crook of her shoulder, kissed it lightly. She ran her fingers through his hair.

The air around them shimmered. The dream, close to breaking.

“We found the piece of the Fount,” Gabe said reluctantly into the crook of her neck. “But then we got captured by the Prime Minister’s pirate lover. After he killed him.”

“That was probably information you should have shared before we got started,” she said, nuzzling into his neck.

“Probably,” Gabe agreed, arching beneath her touch. “But for once, I did what I wanted to do first.”

She couldn’t blame him for that.

“You’ve had an exciting few days,” Lore said. “What with a pirate lover.”

“Believe me, it is more irritating than interesting.” He shifted over her, running light fingers down her side. “In fact, I am currently passed out in what I believe he is using for a dungeon.”

“You should be dealing with that instead of sleeping with me.”

“On the contrary, I found it a welcome respite.”

She tunneled her hand into his hair. “So what does he want?”

“Don’t know yet.” They were so used to strangeness at this point.

So used to nothing going well. Gabe sighed and rolled off her, curling up by her side, his hand idly wandering down the line of her neck to her shoulder and back again.

“But it will probably hinder our ability to bring the piece to the Mount.”

Lore thought of Nyxara’s memories of the pantheon’s time on the Golden Mount.

How They’d all moved through the threads of the atmosphere, the world allowing Them unnatural passage.

“Maybe there’s a way to get here besides taking a ship.

The gods used to do that. Moving through the elements They had power over. ”

His gentle tracing paused. “I’ve done it. It didn’t end well.”

She sucked in a sharp breath. “I was afraid of that.”

His hand started moving again, though it wasn’t as steady.

“Malcolm did it first, by accident. Told me that Braxtos came close to taking over when he did.” He shook his head, churning sand.

“I did it after—desperate times—and Hestraon almost had me. Malcolm was right.” He looked at her. “But if it’s our only option—”

“No.” She pressed her palm against his jaw. “I can’t handle that. I can’t handle it happening to both of you.”

Gabe and Bastian, both taken from her, eclipsed in godhood.

“We’ll find another way.” She said it with conviction, like she could make it true.

He closed his eye. He wore no patch over the other, something she just now noticed. The socket was healed cleanly. “If it saves us,” he murmured, “it’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

She stroked her hand over his stubbled cheek.

A heartbeat, then Gabe looked away from her, out at the endless ocean, twisting a lock of her hair around his finger. “It’s quite a lot of power we’ll be giving up,” he said. “Once we remake the Fount.”

There was a question in his tone. Like maybe he didn’t think that was the best plan after all.

And after her conversation with the Fount, that first day when she and Dani had arrived, Lore couldn’t argue with him. “Yes,” she said. “That’s the current plan.”

Current was doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Their thoughts traveled along the same lines, she knew. Maybe turning all this power back over to the Fount wasn’t the right call. Maybe they could do more good trying to master it themselves.

But even though they were both thinking it, neither she nor Gabe said it.

The beach shimmered again, the atmosphere taking on a glassy, unreal quality. She turned in his arms, kissed him again, deep and long. “I love you. And if you see Bastian before I do, tell him I love him.”

A question here, too. Gauging his reaction. Seeing how it landed.

Gabe sighed, cupping his hand against the side of her head. His thumb ran over the scar on her temple. “I didn’t know I could do it,” he murmured. “Love two people at once.”

“Me either,” she said. “I thought love would always come with choices, so I just refused to really make them. Even when I said I would marry Bastian, because I loved him, I loved you, too.” She covered his hand with her own. “Love is bigger than we thought.”

“Far bigger.” Then, with another kiss to her cheek, Gabe was gone.

A blink, and she was back in the grove, awake on the Mount as it was now.

When Lore stood, she was pleasantly sore, her body languid and satiated.

She supposed she should be glad that Alie or Malcolm hadn’t popped in while she and Gabe were busy, but she couldn’t help but wish Bastian had. She’d never seen him on the beach; she assumed because Apollius had pushed him so far down in his own mind that simple dreaming wasn’t a possibility.

The sky edged toward night. She’d slept the rest of the day away.

Lore made her way back to the Fount, wandering over the dead island.

She’d been disturbed at first by the fact that nothing else lived here.

No people, no animals or insects. Now it was nice to walk for miles and know you were almost completely alone, if you didn’t count the woman who’d betrayed you and the god who should be dead.

It was almost beautiful, the way the moonlight filtered through the dead trees, made all the shadows stark. Especially after months without really seeing it, on the Second Isle where the smog was thick. It reflected on the cloud of ash below the peak, and on the water in the Fount.

Water that was shining gold.

Her brow furrowed. Slowly, Lore approached the Fount, as if It were a wild animal that might leap out at her. It had told her It could hold Spiritum, even broken as It was, gathering more every time Bastian fought free. Here was the proof.

The water in the Fount was still, always still. But as she watched, strands of gold twisted through the depths, just a slight shimmer. They were hard to see when she looked directly at them; Lore did better when she angled her eyes away.

Lore dropped herself into channeling-space.

The change from a colored world to grayscale wasn’t that pronounced here, where everything was moonlit and burnt. The only thing that really changed was the water in the Fount.

Golden threads ran through it, as thick as they had been in the ocean, when Lore followed them to the Mount. A mass of black, too: the Mortem she’d given back. And shot through it all, flickers of blue.

Spiritum, and Mortem, and Caeliar’s power, bits of it reclaimed from Apollius every time Bastian took control.

Lore settled herself against the side of the Fount—touching It didn’t hurt like touching the piece had, as if that pain were an impetus to put it back where it belonged.

She stared up at the moon, idly twisting Dani’s dagger in her fingers, thinking about that solid wall of rock at the cliff face, and what she was almost sure was hidden behind it.

If she could only find a way in.